Egypt in the European Selfconsciousness

The ancient culture of Egypt played an important role in Western Europe's culture in the 18th century. It was a resurrection of the historization of the ideology of renaissance which found in the Greek and Roman literature Egypt as the mother of world-culture. The ruling levels of each society develop a view of its own value including a concept of history which is always a subjective view accepting those trends which seem to support their own power and aims. The ruled masses were influenced by the concept of their rulers - taking form and elements of their culture. The Egyptian trends of the 18th and 19th centuries were in main aristocratic designing Egypt as the protohistory of Greece and Rome, the later ones conceived as the forefathers of Europe. The scientifique development in the 19th and 20th centuries was partly impressed by the glorification of ancient Egypt as the center of world, but it was proved to be only one of the old cultures overestimated by traditionalists.